Order (2012)

Order (2012)

ORDER explores the humanity in scenes we encounter everyday from the perspective of someone with obsessive tendencies to organize and clean and from someone the opposite. People have varying perceptions of “neatness,” but neither the messy nor the overly clean realize how deep they've fallen into their habits until they can see the contrast. Do messy people simply have no care for order or hygiene? Or are overly clean people wasting their efforts for no purpose? This project juxtaposes both behaviors and aims to critically examine the human psychology of neatness.

I explored these behaviors by documenting the same scene in parallel, as it would appear in the life of the neat and the life of the messy. While the owner of each scene is anonymous, the personality of each person is clearly expressed through the amount of order or disorder. Each pair of images shows how deeply ingrained in our habits they have become—from the smallest task of peeling fruit to the most time-consuming moment of sleeping.